Workers' personal income falls across South Florida

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Florida metro areas suffered some of the nation's largest declines in income in 2009

August 10, 2010|By Jeff Ostrowski, The Palm Beach Post

Margaret Soucy considers herself fortunate to have a job, but not so lucky to have a position that pays 20 percent less than her previous paycheck. Soucy, an administrative assistant who lives in West Palm Beach, has cut back on movies, restaurant meals and other luxuries she once didn't think twice about.

"There's no living, there's just surviving right now," Soucy said.

That could be the mantra for millions of Floridians. Florida metro areas suffered some of the nation's largest declines in income in 2009, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis reported this week.

Personal income in the Miami metropolitan statistical area, which includes Palm Beach County, fell to $229.4 billion in 2009 from $234.8 billion in 2008. The 3.1 percent decline ranked 332nd of 366 metro areas.

Per capita personal income in Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade counties fell to $41,352 in 2009, down from $43,013 in 2008 and $42,967 in 2007.

Naples had the nation's largest decline in personal income, at 7.1 percent.

Strangely, official estimates of income in the region held steady from 2007 to 2008, even as the housing market tanked and jobless rates soared. The state's weak economy finally took a bite out of Floridians' incomes in 2009.

Because of Florida's subpar job market, pay cuts here outpaced those elsewhere. Nationally, the average decline in income was 1.8 percent, but many Florida metro areas had bigger drops, including Orlando's 2.9 percent, Sarasota's 4.3 percent and Fort Myers' 4.5 percent.

"It's another sign that the momentum of the recovery has declined significantly," said Sean Snaith, an economist at the University of Central Florida.

One more indication of the weakness of the private sector: The metro areas that saw the biggest gains in personal income were small towns near military bases. Jacksonville, N.C., led the way with a 14 percent increase in personal income, followed by Fayetteville, N.C.; Manhattan, Kan.; and Elizabethtown, Ky.

For her part, Soucy hopes for an economic recovery, but for now she's suffering the triple whammy of the housing meltdown, the highest unemployment rates in decades and a choppy stock market.